Hello all. i need a lil help. i have been googling and googling for over 3 hours now with not much luck. I have a file server at home sorta speak. I have a win xp machine at home. i think it is home edition. not sure. cant remember. haha. anyway. i have 4 drives in the machine. each one has a folder under it named netdrive. they are shared folders. Then my wifes laptop, she has the drives mapped to her laptop so she canstore her files. She asked me if it was possible to password protect the folder. I cant seem to figure out how to do this. i even tried third party softwares but they all will not protect network drives.

I tried to make a .zip wioth a password and then everytime she wants to save something she has to add it to the archive and then re-password protect that. haha

to much work. I dont want the folder to ask for her windows password, i want her windows account name and password seperate from the protected folder.

I'd recommend moving to Win 7 pro so you can use bitlocker to encrypt files. Truecrypt is a decent free solution and you can setup auto-mount to make things a little more seamless for her (assuming she is not tech savvy). I have a 08 server running at home and just copied my wife's files to it. Then made a static mapping to the share on her Mac. It's secured using NTFS perms so always requires a pw for non-windows systems and systems not on the domain. If you can't use a Windows server, you can always build a Linux SAMBA server. FreeNAS can work as well.

If you are running in Workgroup mode (all your XP systems are on the same WORKGROUP), create local accounts on the "file server" and share out the files. Just change the default sharing permissions accordingly (I haven't used home ever so not sure what it supports for sharing). Pro will support NTFS perms which I would recommend over the default sharing.

I was thinking of a samba but then i realized she may need to use the machine as a desktop machine. She does not like to use her laptop all the time, and i can see that. it is fun to use the desktop every once in a while. haha

i think i will go win xp and set up a user account.

ok, so to make sure i do it right, i just create a new account on the winxp file server, name it with her name and give it a password. then when she tries to connect to it via a mapped drive, she will have to put in a user name and password? this is all going to be done in workgroup. no domain.

I think know is the time for me to put security on my wifi instead of leaving it open. it has been left open for 5 years. haha.